Glass Swords

On his debut, this young Glasgow post-dubstep producer seems to understand that the surest route to dance music immortality is to reach both the dabblers and the hardcore by marrying innovation with hooks.

Twenty years ago, Warp released Frequencies, the debut album by LFO, a duo who'd come up in the North England rave scene and scored an unexpected UK chart hit with their bold and brutal eponymous bleep techno single. This year, Warp releases Glass Swords, the debut album by Rustie, a young Glasgow producer who's come up in the protean post-dubstep scene and has yet to rough up the mainstream. (Give him time, though, especially if he catches the ear of a diva.) Most of the vinyl-only singles by LFO's revolutionary contemporaries are now sadly forgotten. In another 20 years, there's a good chance that most of the singles by Rustie's boundary-pushing peers will likewise be gathering metaphorical dust in the deep recesses of some iPod. But LFO's music has survived, and I have a feeling Rustie's will too. Because Rustie knows, like LFO knew, that the surest route to dance music immortality is to reach both the dabblers and the hardcore, marrying underground innovation with as many of electronic music's biggest ideas and best hooks as you can cram in.

Frequencies kicked off with LFO literally asking, "What is house?" The duo's answer was the album itself. For LFO, house was everything that had already come along, from wistful Kraftwerk to future-shock electro to beatific Detroit techno. They then edited it all into short and vibrant jolts, without watering things down a bit. Glass Swords takes the same tack, to brilliant and sometimes bewildering effect. The heavy wobble of dubstep is the frame that holds everything together, but thankfully Rustie's no purist. The title track is a dreamy and disorienting merger of metal guitar and IDM ambiance, bombastic and beatless, that owes as much to a portentous Metallica intro as old-school shoegaze swirl as Daft Punk's kitschy take on progressive rock. And like the new wave of take-rave-back-to-the-kids producers, Rustie is also fearless about rehabilitating and reinventing the genre's cheesiest and most pleasurable moments, the stuff dubstep's more glower-prone producers wouldn't even claim as being part of the genre's DNA. On the so-giddy-it-feels-unstable "Crystal Echo", you might mistake Rustie for a happy hardcore producer brought out of retirement to remix Rihanna, all squeaky, sped-up voices and hammering drums, twinkling melodies running smack into dubstep's bass whomp. Glass Swords might just as well have opened with Rustie asking, "What is dubstep?" His answer is the same as LFO's was for house: Everything, but as shiny and delirious and speaker-rattling as you can make it.

But Rustie is operating in a world where radio producers have already plundered dubstep for fresh sounds, and as if knowing he's now competing as much with Billboard hit-makers, his tracks have the maximalist zeal of Max Martin bubblegum. Even his most traditionally "dubstep" tunes won't sit still or do what they're supposed to, maniacally morphing plastic basslines and synth riffs with the sharpness of the album's titular crystal weaponry. "Surph" has the genre's requisite big bass drops, but Rustie also throws in pop-rave pianos, trance keyboards, and snippets of sugary R&B, because he can, because he's showing off, because it's fun, because he's never interested in just turning out another scene-pleasing exercise. He shares the make-it-immediate urge of Deadmau5 and his ilk but has no time for their simplicity or brutality. One of the best things about Glass Swords is that, for all of its pop-goes-clubbing bluster, it's also as psychedelic, where the devil's in the zillion little details zigzagging across the tracks-- as you'd expect from a Warp album-- whether we're talking their classic-era IDM records or more recent signings like Flying Lotus. "Cry Flames" has more of metal's brute force in its gnarled groove, but the real shiver-inducing moment comes when Rustie begins weaving a fragile, almost Satie-like piano melody into the bass snarl.

All that said, there's not a lot here that will redefine your ideas of what dubstep or electronic music in general can do. For all of Rustie's skill as a sculptor of very 21st-century beats, Glass Swords can feel just as much like a "greatest bits" collage. A lot of déjà vu elements are worked onto the framework of a current club trend, little hints of everything from Art of Noise to U-Ziq to the S.O.S. Band to old RPG soundtracks colliding with dubstep's bass pressure. But compared to the sterile sound of most retro-collage electronic albums, it's also an undeniable and up-to-the-minute rush. And in a couple of decades, when you're looking for an instant hit of what electronic pop felt like in 2011, you'll be able to throw on Glass Swords and get a dose of that feeling in its purest form.